Hacker activists in Belarus have reportedly hacked into computers controlling the country's trains in an attempt to delay the arrival of Russian troops in Ukraine. Cyber Partisans, as the hacker activists call themselves, said on Sunday that some trains were stopped in the cities of Minsk and Orsha, as well as the town of Osipovichi, after hackers compromised the railway system's routing and switching devices, encrypting information and rendering them inoperable.
Several websites linked to the railway network of Belarus returned error messages on Sunday. A former railway employee of Belarus, who runs a Telegram channel popular among railway workers in the country, reported that the train systems in Minsk and Orsha had «paralyzed». At the same time on Belarus's Internet forums, some reported a disruption in the trains in Minsk.Despite’ the turmoil government representatives in Belarus did not respond to any request for comment.
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The activist hackers said that the purpose of the attack was to «slow down the transport» of Russian troops traveling from bases in Belarus to northern Ukraine and to buy more time for the Ukrainians so that they could repel Russia's attacks on the country. More specifically, they reported that they had set the train system to «manual control» mode that would significantly slow the movement of trains, but would not create emergency situations.
Sergei Voitehowich, a former employee of Belarus’ state-owned Belarus Railway who helps run an online forum for Belarusian railway workers, said hackers had damaged a train traffic control system. This caused disruption to train movements, especially at a junction between Minsk and Orsha. Voitehowich added that the traffic control system had been restored after the breach, but other systems were down and the websites of the external train network were down.
In late January, Cyber Partisans said they had targeted the Belarusian state railways and encrypted the majority of the company’s servers, databases, and workstations. Additionally, the group appears to have targeted Belarusian government and police agencies with cyberattacks. For example, last year, hackers leaked a data dump that included police records, lists of police informants, personal information about top government officials and spies, videos collected by police drones, and secret phone recordings from the government’s wiretapping system.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has pushed the group to focus on disrupting Russian military movements lately. Russia has used Belarus as a hub to enter the northern parts of Ukraine. The Ukrainian government has actively sought the help of volunteer hackers during the conflict. Teams of professionals and people with computer expertise have united on social media channels to identify Russian websites and officials that could be potential targets for cyber attacks.
Source: bloomberg.com
